O Great LJ Hivemind

XP disk with no filesystem
What would the team recommend for recovering data from a drive with a
damaged filesystem? The PC will not find any of its files and will not
boot either in safe mode or recovery mode.

We suspect that Windows Update decided to reboot the machine whilst a
defrag was in progress; I therefore suspect that the filesystem is
(mostly) still present but the pointers leading to it have been lost.

No, it's not one of my machines - it belongs to my mother-in-law.

Tim